A basic component of education is the assessment of a student's learning. This is not only useful for assigning grades but also for diagnosing deficiencies and recommending ways to improve a particular student's learning. Similarly, it is useful to assess the abilities, knowledge, reasoning, memorization, and/or the like of an assessee in a variety of situations, including education, training, certification, licensing, applications, and the like. One of the most time-consuming and tedious duties of a teacher or other assessor is the grading of assessment activities.
Automatic or semiautomatic mechanisms for grading assessments and providing feedback to students would greatly improve the educational process. The current trend towards Massive Open Online Courses highlights this need for less labor-intensive assessment strategies. When a class contains thousands or even tens of thousands of students, a teacher cannot reasonably hand grade all of the assessments. As students start to learn more independently, there is a serious need for additional assessments to identify where learning has not occurred. Without a teacher playing close attention, more assessment is needed to track progress. With increased assessment comes an increased grading load.
The classic solution to automatic grading has been the multiple choice question. These questions are very easy to grade by hand, and technology to support such question grading has existed for decades. Many students have answered quizzes by coloring in bubbles on a sheet to be scanned by an automatic grading machine. Within a classroom context, “clickers” have been used. These devices allow students to express one of several choices to a question posed by an instructor during class. The instructor gets immediate feedback on how many students selected the various answers. In computer-based coursework such multiple choice answers are indicated by radio button widgets that a student can select.
The big challenge of multiple choice answers is that human knowledge is more complex. Students develop strategies for eliminating choices and guessing at answers without actually developing a real sense of the material. Trying to assess more sophisticated concepts is difficult with multiple choice strategies. Some systems allow students to enter numbers that can be matched against correct answers. Others allow students to type words or short phrases and then provide various rules and schemes by which the instructor can define what a correct answer is. There is a continuing need for more sophisticated ways to pose assessment problems to students and then automatically or semi-automatically grade their answers.